Nvidia boasts of gaming growth, beats expectations

Nvidia has beaten market expectations with its most recent earnings report, with chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang pointing to its high-performance computing (HPC) and new Maxwell architecture GPUs as major contributors.

In the company's latest earnings call, it announced revenue of $1.225 billion with a shrinking-but-still-healthy gross margin of 55.2 per cent for overall net income of $173 million - up 35 per cent compared to the preceding quarter and a whopping 45 per cent year-on-year. That's better than the market was expecting, and its executives claim it's a result of a diverse portfolio of products but especially.

'We continue our transformation into a business focused on visual computing platforms,' Huang claimed during a conference call announcing the results, 'allowing us to realise continued success in consumer PC and mobile gaming as well as in cloud data centres, supercomputers, professional design and automobiles.'

Huang also claimed great success for his company's new Maxwell architecture, which offers improved efficiency compared to last-generation graphics processors. 'Right now one of the most exciting things going on is driving beyond 1080p. 4K monitors are getting more and more cost effective, and without something like Maxwell, it's really hard to enjoy the full fidelity of a 4k display,' he claimed. 'But I think at the highest level, gaming is just expanding globally, and now with Maxwell and a brand new architecture that gives us a huge leap from previous generation, we’re going to draw people out to upgrade to Maxwell so that they can take their gaming experience to the next level.'

Figures shared by Huang during the call showed a 30 per cent increase in PC gaming revenue for the year. Huang also claimed 'record quarters' for the growth of Nvidia's Tesla GPU-based accelerator division, and an increasing uptake of its Tegra ARM-based mobile system-on-chip processors by both mobile makers and the automotive industry - the latter likely thanks to the company's dedicated facility in Michigan.